The ChangingMinds Blog!

The smell of anxiety

Have you ever picked up on how other people feel? Empathy is an important
human skill that enables us to connect with others and consequently respond to
their emotions in appropriate ways. When another person is upset, for example,
we will ask them how they are and maybe try to help them feel better.

But how does empathy work? How do we read how others are feeling?

A simple way we read the emotions of others is through interpreting their
body language, either
consciously or unconsciously. Likewise, we pick up on voice tone and any
emotionally significant word patterns. Another factor that may not be obvious is
smell. The sense of smell is a primitive system that many animals use to good
effect in assessing the world around them, including other animals. We don't go
sniffing other people's bodies, but subtle olfactory influences do exist.

An interesting bit of research by
Katrin Haegler and colleagues shows that smell can even cause us to behave
differently without any intermediate conscious thinking. They collected sweat
from both anxious gamblers and non-anxious bike riders, and then exposed
subjects to these while asking them to make risky bets. Rather curiously, those
who were exposed to the 'anxious sweat' took longer to decide and then made
riskier bets.

This seems a curious reaction and even the researchers did not know how to
explain it. Perhaps a group of people being threatened by a predator would be
emboldened when some of their number became afraid, thereby increasing the
chance of somebody stepping up and fighting the attacker.

What does it mean for us? Will casino owners employ scared people to wander
around, encouraging others to gamble more? Perhaps more realisitically, when
working around anxious people, we should watch how both we and others approach
risks. Whenever research shows something, a really good response is to try to
observe it, to see if you can tell the difference. Then, if you can detect a
difference (and beware of your internal biases making you think you can
tell), then look for ways to make use of this knowledge.